The Fluffbucket Diaries

Watched a few episodes of “The Cuphead Show” this weekend. This fun take on the old Fleischer cartoon style of the 1930s prompted me to show Frannie a couple of vintage clips that, honestly, struck me as downright odd and surreal.

Surprisingly sharp for being up late with 3.5 hours of sleep the night before.

Wordle 267 3/6

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It is generally best to avoid reading the comments on any given news site or social media venue. But this piece about the surprising online joy of 1980s postpunk and new wave fans – my generation – makes me want to poke through the ruminations under Joy Division and Modern English clips on YouTube.

Now eating queso-flavored pork rinds to get my mind off Korean fried chicken.

Was listening to a podcast about how it’s okay not to be passionate about your job while I was working on server maintenance for work today. On a Saturday. After roughly 3.5 hours of sleep. After pulling more or less an all-nighter working on it.

I’m not really passionate about my work. I like my job, and I’m a hard worker – but for the sake of my health and sanity, I’ve tamped down my workaholic tendencies somewhat in the past year or two. Still, this is stuff that needs to be done, and I was scheduled to work today for a few hours on this server work. It’s just more time-consuming than I had anticipated.

And now I’m listening to another podcast on how to deal with burnout.

Up late—or early—with work, so why not take a break and Wordle now?

Wordle 266 3/6

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Catching up this weekend with my more-or-less-dormant Catholic commonplace blog, Rosa Mystica. I’ve even added a link to it in the navigation here.

Now that I’ve gotten over my performative mode about it (that is, posting self-consciously for whatever reason), I’m using it as a means of organizing the zillions of quotes and resources I tend to collect. I’m kind of excited about using it as a vehicle for Lenten devotional practice.

Blogging as a Lenten devotional practice. That’s new.

A very close call.

Wordle 265 6/6

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Wordle 264 4/6

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Moya Lothian-McLean in the Guardian:

On social media, to be silent is to be found wanting. Despite the different registers of specific platforms (Instagram, for example, is all earnest “awareness”, whereas TikTok is laced with a frenetic, theatre-kid energy), all of them depend on compelling users to actively produce and engage with content. In times of crisis, this demand – baked into code in order to ensure profit for tech bosses – has found itself expressed as a moral obligation. In the case of Ukraine, to visibly engage and express solidarity is viewed as akin to enacting it through practical, tangible action. We are not looking away. We are analysing, boosting and amplifying. We are posting through it.

Wordle 263 4/6

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The other great part about my birthday: the annual Frannie card. I am a lucky mom.

Birthday No. 56 is in the books. And it may well be a template for however many birthdays I have left.

On the surface, it wasn’t that rollicking: morning Mass and rosary with a dear friend from my old (Episcopal) parish who is now in the Roman fold, a leisurely breakfast afterward with said friend, and then a few delightful hours with the Blessed Sacrament at Marytown. Short of an overnight retreat, the day alone was a gift.

On the way home, I found a new (to me) Korean fried chicken place and brought home a batch of chicken with pickled radish and rice for dinner. Then, after dinner, F and I made a batch of brownies.

More than 50 grams over my carb limit later, I couldn’t have asked for a better way to celebrate the gift of another year, thanks be to God.

Happy birthday to me.

Wordle 262 4/6

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My colleague was downright breathless about my taking a day off from work tomorrow.

“What are you doing for your birthday?” she asked.

Having breakfast with a friend and then going to Marytown to spend the afternoon on a mini-retreat, I said.

“Like one of the retreats you’ve done before? Where you think about suffering and stuff?”

Well, not quite like that, I told her.

“Good for you!” she said happily. “This is a day for you!”

Um, yeah, kinda, I mumbled awkwardly. But not really.

Sure, it’s my birthday, but it’s not like it’s a spa day or something. I have a track record in recent years or hating my birthday. I mean, really hating my birthday. Like brooding over it. Either nobody notices it, or everybody notices it. I’ve vowed for years that I’d just as soon go away for the day, maybe go on retreat and focus on something besides getting old and feeling forgotten. And finally, I get a chance to do just that.

So no, I don’t want this to be a day just for me. Going to a shrine honoring a saint martyred at Auschwitz isn’t exactly getting a massage and a makeover. Spending the afternoon in front of the Blessed Sacrament isn’t a rollicking, self-indulgent whoop-de-doo. But I don’t want a big whoop-de-doo.

Getting “me time” for my Lenten birthday would be a most depressing gift, honestly.

A quiet, peaceful “Jesus time,” though? Sure, I’ll take it.

Wordle 261 4/6

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The news about this ridiculous “convoy” around D.C. is sorely testing my resolve to fast from mockery for Lent. Time to curb my news intake again.

As my birthday approaches, I don’t need another thing to make me feel old this week.

Insert bland non-spoiler text here.

Wordle 260 4/6

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This photo on the front of The New York Times website (accompanying a link to Maureen Dowd’s latest column) is the pictorial equivalent of the acronym “WTF.”

Perhaps it’s just as well that I’m stepping away from social media for a spell. From Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic ($), the war in Ukraine has unleashed a phenomenon that predates the Internet, but has found a new venue there:

…the behavior on display is, if nothing else, a product of a lack of sense. It’s the agitated, aimless buzzing of the type of crowd that gathers in the aftermath of some bewildering catastrophe. Social scientists have a name for this mode of chaos: They call it ‘milling.’…

The word comes from the mid-20th-century American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who was interested in the process by which crowds converge, during moments of uncertainty and restlessness, on common attitudes and actions. As people mill about the public square, those nearby will be drawn into their behavior, Blumer wrote in 1939. ‘The primary effect of milling is to make the individuals more sensitive and responsive to one another, so that they become increasingly preoccupied with one another and decreasingly responsive to ordinary objects of stimulation.’ …

We’re emoting, lecturing, correcting, praising, and debunking. We’re offering up dumb stuff that immediately gets swatted down. (We’re getting ‘ratioed,’ as it’s called on Twitter.) We’re being aimless and embarrassing and loud and responding to each other’s weird behavior. ‘People are kind of struggling to figure out appropriate ways of responding to this really uncertain situation,’ Timothy Recuber, an assistant sociology professor at Smith College, told me. …

After a crowd gets done with milling, Blumer theorized, it moves on to doing things—things that can be ‘strange, forbidding, and sometimes atrocious.’ Later scholars pointed out that milling crowds can also end up engaging in not-so-terrifying behaviors, and that individuals do not usually lose all control of their faculties in the face of a disaster. But the idea that milling is a first response to horrifying or confusing situations has indeed held up.

I need to do more with this space besides my Wordle scores. Haven’t had a ton of time lately to do so. And now that I’m largely done during Lent (except Sundays) with social media – where a lot of my source material would come from – I guess this means I need to read and think about stuff more.

Actually thought about what ultimately was the answer on the third try. Shouldn’t have second-guessed myself then.

Wordle 259 4/6

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Not quite by a thread.

Wordle 258 4/6

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My brain seems to work more quickly with this game lately.

Wordle 257 3/6

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